


earthbound; coming down

by hardscrabble



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Community: inceptiversary, I'm sorry I can't take myself seriously, M/M, Missions Gone Wrong, POV Eames (Inception), Psychological Drama, Rescue Missions, Temporary Character Death, Torture, and the fact that 'temporary character death' is an autotag is hysterically funny, but also there are x-men references, if you look closely this is a 5+1, okay all of that makes it sound really heavy and like, okay it is actually kind of heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 19:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20376721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: Arthur is here to kill him, obviously. Well, too bad for him.[Limbo fic.]





	earthbound; coming down

**Author's Note:**

> for inceptiversary trope bingo 2019, prompt "Kiss of Distraction."

It’s hot and dusty and horridly bright in the streets, unless it’s hot and dusty and too shadowy to let Eames even read the street signs, if there are any, and the transition from one to the other leaves him blinking away strobe patterns of afterimages, washes of orange-green-purple on the insides of his eyelids and scintilla in grids overlaid on the mosaic of humanity and market stalls and—all of that. So he, of course, sensibly, is holed up at his regular gambling house, where the continuity of the power supply has been thoroughly secured with bribes and the air conditioning is complete and the light is suitably dim. The crowds are just as dense, but here they’re less fevered, content to stand in one place or engage in a sort of socialite Brownian motion. Everyone looks precisely as if they want to be in a casino. Mostly men, and the women are evenly split between arm candy and active players.

He has his eye on a blonde, right now. Not _that_ kind of an eye; he’s working out the odds of her being exactly as she appears. They’re decreasing by the second. She’s a gorgeous woman, broad shoulders and stunning bone structure, striking eyes, hair groomed perfectly. In the cool humming dimness of the casino, she’s an icy brightness, a silence. The collar of her dress is made up of cord work, fine beaded strands crisscrossing over her bust into two straps and a halter; for a mad, off-balance moment, he thinks she might unravel if one were to pull the right strand—he’ll lay off the gin for a while; he signals for a glass of water.

Much as he’s staring, she hasn’t noticed, or hasn’t given the appearance of noticing. She speaks whenever necessary, _call_ or _fold_ or _raise_, but aside from her lips parting, her face barely moves. Californian, in accent at least; she’s got the flatness that lends itself so well to throwing one’s voice—

“Your water,” says a waiter, offering a tray, and instantly every one of Eames’s senses is on alert, because the words are right but the delivery is _wrong_. Intonation, emphasis, accent—rhotics American-clear, vowels sanded down from Brooklyn roundness; “your” so carefully pronounced; the _play_ at deference. The waiter _looks_ right, as much as Eames can see (he refuses to look up yet, doesn’t know what might break the façade, no point in taking risks), but he’s not worked a service job a day in his life, and now that Eames is looking for it, the other wrongnesses come out. His trousers are black, yes, but they’re linen, beautifully tailored, a quarter-break over the shoe with the precision of an architectural blueprint. The vest is notably different from the by-the-dozen polyester satin-backed things the rest of the staff wears, lustrous with expense and care.

Eames takes the tumbler and mutters something that sounds approximately like _cheers_ and pretends to sip, all as he wracks his brain. Just the other morning he’d checked all his own affairs, knotted the loose ends and cut the tails. There’s nothing of _his_ that’s got someone slipping men onto the staff at his gambling house, which means it’s something of one of his associates, which is only a pool of, oh, fifty. Cut down to those he’s worked with in the last—three months, call it, and the number drops to a dozen. His mental Rolodex is well up-to-date, and he knows right off that half that number are clean as whistles.

The would-be waiter has moved out of Eames’s field of vision, which is just as well. Another three of his dozen are in hiding. Possibly problematic. The final three are a dead man (old age, nothing untoward), a married-again heiress who only steals art to keep her hand in (honeymooning in the Cyclades), and Arthur.

He nearly spills the water, because, _fuck, _the accent, the clothes—the details _too _good, the execution _too_ careful. Arthur all over.

They’d left it badly, he remembers that, if nothing else. They’d left it badly, because Arthur had fucked up on a job, and they’d lost the money, and Eames has been being the bigger person and not retaliating topside. There’s _no_ reason for Arthur to be here, professionally. They aren’t like that; they’ve never been like that; Arthur comes to him on his ground with his hands conspicuous in their emptiness and Eames meets him at neutral locations and they do their bargaining like civilized criminals.

Arthur does not come to his city and _infiltrate his casino staff_. Not unless—

It falls into place, and he can only manage a sort of disappointment at the result. Arthur is here to kill him, obviously. Him, himself—Arthur is here to kill Eames. More likely on someone else’s behalf than on his own; they all have their side lines, don’t they? The heiress in the Cyclades, she’d find this absolutely delicious, sending _Arthur_ to kill him.

Well, too bad for her.

Eames checks his watch needlessly and stands just quickly enough to enact surprise. He gets a heavy-faced man—jowly, blue of eye, grey of hair, wearing a positively soporific black suit, likes to think he’s _distinguished_ when really he’s just fuck-you rich—between him and the bar, keeps him there until they hit the stairs, and then speeds up, clatters down the stairs in a rush. He’s not fully certain where he’s going yet; it rather depends on whether—he won’t look, he insists to himself, he won’t check. Not until he’s blocks away from the casino. Which, considering the general state of the city, wouldn’t be for another twenty minutes for your average citizen, but Eames has never been average. He ducks into a washroom on the first floor, goes for his stash, changes out of his khakis and sport coat and shirt and bloody derby shoes into track pants and sneakers and a t-shirt that’ll breathe, even in the heat.

Then he gets up on one of the toilets and wriggles right out the window. He lands on the awning over the ground floor, a real Indiana Jones kind of move, but the only thing that matters is getting clear, which Eames is very, _very_ good at.

He’s sweating in seconds, but he’s blocks away in a minute, and when he looks around from his vantage point a story above the street, he doesn’t see a lick of patent hair or goddamned tailoring or—

“Eames,” says Arthur, behind him. He sounds frustrated, which isn’t the sort of tone Eames is expecting, but if any assassin were to sound that cranky, it’d be Arthur, wouldn’t it? Eames pulls his combat knife from its sheath at his side, and before Arthur has blinked he’s spilling his intestines into the dusty street, and it’s too bad, really; Eames had quite liked the bloke, but needs must.

“Sorry, darling,” he mutters, although he won’t be heard, considering that he’s already thirty feet away, the knife dropped into a useful garbage heap (he’s got another four like it). Besides, Arthur’s already tumbled into the street. Eames angled the slash to nick his superior mesenteric artery, because lingering deaths are never a good way to end a working relationship.

There’s surprisingly little screaming, he thinks, after the drop of a body trailing guts like party streamers into the middle of a market. Then again, that’s what you get in a city like this one.

In twenty minutes, he’s in his flat, showered, and establishing a solid and _loud_ alibi with a woman from three flights up whose addiction to gossip has won his affections nearly as much as that other thing she does with her tongue.

Eames can’t think how he’d ever convinced himself to leave the southern hemisphere. Youthful stupidity.

***

“How long?”

“Thirty-four seconds—what happened?”

“Stabbed.”

“_Who?_”

“Him. Don’t look at me like that.”

“You _put_ him there—”

“I _know_. Going back. Five minutes.”

“I—okay.”

***

The harmattan is particularly awful this time around, but Eames rather thinks there’s a bright side to it; he’s always got something to strike up a conversation about. The city is harried and horrid, tied-down and closed-in. Half the population has a bloody nose, it seems, and the entire expat community sloshes about like a sluggish sea among its bars and clubs and casinos and hotels, everyone clutching handkerchiefs to their faces and carrying saline sprays. Arthur arrived recently, he’s heard through a series of grapevines, but that’s Arthur’s business, isn’t it?

It does strike him as faintly wrong, dissonant, that Arthur is in the city at all. While there’s nothing _prohibiting _him from the country, or indeed the continent, the man is a denizen of northern metropolises, one of those striding along busy pavements in a wide-lapeled overcoat, ignoring his fellow humans unless absolutely necessary. It isn’t like that here. Everyone talks to everyone, expat or native, young or old; it’s only politeness.

He knows they’ve something to discuss, eventually, although Eames personally doesn’t trust Arthur farther than he could throw him, crush or not. Arthur’s crush, that is. Eames tends to maintain neutrality in his opinions of sometimes-colleagues, although he’ll admit Arthur’s fit. He isn’t blind, only careful. In any case, they have business. It’s not a terrible surprise when he walks into the vestibule of his favorite club, sweeping dust from his face and handing off his trench coat to the cloakroom, and sees that unmistakable silhouette at the bar, the contrast of dark pomaded hair and pale skin.

Now it’s just a matter of when, within the next few hours, and exactly what. It may be Arthur is here to beg _his_ pardon, considering how they left things—but that thought is rather unsettling, and Eames can’t put his finger on why. Moving smoothly, he changes his path and diverts himself into the lounge. It’s quiet there, nice for a cup of tea and reading the paper and working out strange gut feelings. It doesn’t do to ignore gut feelings.

He still hasn’t worked it out—_something_ about that last job they’d done had been wonky. But that’s almost always the case in dreamshare; there’s no such thing as an in-and-out, not when the mind’s involved. He feels _wary_, though, suspicious, and he’s on his second cup of tea when Arthur arrives at his table, asking, “You waiting on anyone?”

“Only you,” says Eames, because that’s always the best way to play it. He smiles, pleasant and faraway. “Have a seat.”

Arthur hesitates for a bare second, his hand on the back of the chair across from Eames, and then he pulls it out and sits. “How’s it going?” he says, in that way he has of putting city-kid teenager words into the mien of a businessman.

“Can’t complain.” Eames sips at his tea as Arthur orders coffee. The waitress half-bows, silent. “Well, the weather’s ghastly,” he amends, “but you know that. What about you?”

A waiter glides up, silent, offering a cup. Arthur takes his coffee and drops a sugar cube into it, using the little tongs like he’s been brought up properly. Atypical, both the sugar and the utensil use. He stirs the cube into the dark liquid, staring into his cup, for ten seconds solid before he finally says, “Getting by.” He sounds—tense, like he’s hiding something, but of course he does, because he _is_. Eames is really only concerned with what, exactly, it is. “Wanted to talk with you,” Arthur continues, and glances up from the coffee. “About a—an idea.”

“Bit out of your way, isn’t it, just for a chat.” He turns his head a little, watches the wind carry plumes of deep ochre dust along the street. It hisses, the dust does, along the windows. Arthur is tense through the shoulders, and when he finally sets his bloody spoon down, he fumbles it, a rattle that should be a single _tick_.

“Wasn’t that bad,” Arthur replies. “In the country. Figured I’d—”

Eames smiles again, eyes still on the window as it’s lashed with dust. “Come see an old friend. Is that what you figured.” He knows he looks pleasant; he knows he sounds colder than ice. In his peripheral vision, Arthur’s face falls, that skull-like look he gets when he’s confronted with his own sentimentality.

“Come on, it’s not like—”

“It’s rather exactly like,” says Eames. “An idea, you say.”

Arthur takes a deep breath and glances around. “What happened to Mal,” he says. His face still resembles a death’s-head. “Making sure it doesn’t happen again—”

He could stop himself from saying, “That’d be difficult, wouldn’t it,” but he doesn’t.

The effect is astonishing, like Arthur’s been sucker-punched. He jolts, his shoulders going up around his ears, and what little color is in his face drains. And isn’t that telling? He actually gulps for breath, before he says, “Checked your totem lately?”

Eames allows himself a dry little laugh. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” It’s becoming clearer, Arthur’s job, his angle here. It isn’t much of a stretch from what Eames had expected.

Arthur bites his lip. “Okay,” he says. “Fair enough.” He looks up at Eames again, holds his gaze. “But what if you forgot? That you were dreaming?”

There it is.

A woman gets up from a table to their left. Her blond hair is dark at the roots; he’s always liked that look. The construction of her dress is fascinating, a lattice of beaded cording over storm-cloud-colored satin. It’s got no business being worn at this time of day, but then again, it’s got no business being held for an appropriate occasion; it’s that good of a garment. Eames watches her, approaching their table and then turning toward the door, apparently with enough interest that Arthur follows her path as well; he ends up turning his head, glancing over his shoulder, and then faking like he’s checking something in the lobby. Turns his body away from the table entirely, for an instant.

An instant is all that’s needed for a man who’s good with his hands, and Eames is among the best.

“Saw something you like?” he asks idly, although Arthur has never voiced interest in a woman, as far as he knows, since Eames met him.

Arthur jerks back around. He looks shell-shocked, still—or again—but _determined_. His jaw is set but his eyes are haunted. When he speaks, he sounds perfectly casual. “Want to get out of here?”

“What’s the rush?”

“It’d be good to talk in—y’know, more detail.” Arthur picks up his coffee and drinks, two long swallows.

Eames watches him set the cup down. Then he watches as the poison hits, and says, “Sorry, I just can’t make the time, darling. And since when did you take sugar?” He stands, throws cash on the table—far more than the cost of a cuppa; they’ll know why—and saunters for the door. Behind him, Arthur’s body crumples forward in its spasms, knocking over his coffee.

It’s too bad, an undignified public death like that. But it’s worse, rather, that they’d send _Arthur_ to try and convince Eames to mistrust reality. Whoever _they _are. As if he’s that bloody _easy_, just for a fit bloke who’d like to get him on his back.

The poison is a fast one, relatively, and highly difficult to trace; it’ll appear as though Arthur suffered anaphylaxis, and the extra dosh will go far in allaying inconvenient questions. Eames doesn’t hurry. He collects his overcoat and slips back into the teeth of the wind, feels the harmattan scour his face.

The sting of it overwhelms the last of the sting of betrayal. What’s a turncoat to a murderer, after all?

***

“_Fuck_, goddammit, fuck, _shit_, motherfucking—”

“What happened?”

“Poison, this time.”

“_Jesus_.”

“Had worse. Bad approach. How much time?”

“Forty-three seconds.”

“Fine. Fine, okay. That— Oh, _fuck_.”

“What?”

“He’s—something he said—he’s about…four years behind, where he’s at. So—”

“Before Fischer. Shit, that—that’s rough.”

“I’ll live. Let’s—give me another five.”

A deep breath. “Yeah.”

***

Eames is a little put out. Has been, in fact. Things are bothering him. Things of the type that he should be taking _terribly_ seriously, but he’s preoccupied by the oddness of the things themselves, in addition to the business of being, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the most successful criminals in his sector of the continent.

His life should be too exciting for these sorts of—blank patches in his memory. Like everything goes to a haze, and Eames knows the opiates are a bad idea (only every so often, when he’s too bored for anything else) but he knows from drug effects, and these aren’t those. It’s just—haze. Like a harmattan haze, but it blurs out _everything_, vision and sound and time and memory. When it’s not there, in the clean patches of his memory, he’s jumping between jobs, between crimes and fights and turf wars and all the other things that go along with being one of the more active and (not to be arrogant, _of course_) most skilled felons in the area. His jobs get bad sometimes; they end badly sometimes—he remembers some of the ends, pushing bundles of counterfeit currency into the right hands at the right times so he can lose himself in another neighborhood, so distant it barely counts as the same city except by governance.

The ends he doesn’t remember go to haze, and at the end of the hazes he’s set up in a flat that seems familiar enough, and someone comes ’round sooner rather than later, and then it’s up and at ’em all over.

He is, he supposes, getting rather tired.

It’s nice, knowing that Arthur is nearby. Not on business, or at least, that’s the sense he’s gotten from his sources; Arthur is simply in the city, for one reason or another, probably burying himself in mountains of research. Not with Cobb, which is a bloody relief. Eames knows he should feel more suspicious, should be more cautious, especially in the circumstances, but in the sea of expats and all that—well, it’s just a bit of a comfort to know there’s a familiar face from before, within a few miles.

He does seek Eames out, finally. Sends him a text, a simple little _hello,_ suggests getting a drink. The drink goes well, at one of his favorite bars—and how does Arthur know that? Put it away for later. It goes well enough that it becomes dinner. They’re seated next to a disparate couple, a blond woman in a cocktail dress and a heavy-faced gent wearing a mauve tie that works terribly with his coloring. Arthur, however, looks good, looks _delicious_. He’s steady, quick to smile, wry and funny and relaxed, despite his careful suiting, the gleam of his hair, the shadows beneath his eyes. But that’s just typical, isn’t it, Arthur working himself to exhaustion. They talk about the military, their shared _before_, and before Eames knows it, the restaurant is closing, their odd neighbors are long gone, and Eames doesn’t quite want to go.

Which he isn’t going to indulge, but _Arthur_ isn’t leaving, which is—

_Oh_, he thinks, and invites Arthur up to his flat, because it’s quicker than waiting for Arthur to get to the point. Another glass of whiskey, maybe a coffee. Arthur seems pleased to accept, and he doesn’t shift away when Eames places his hand at the small of his back, leaves it there as they walk through the city streets. In the elevator in his building, Eames gets into Arthur’s space, and Arthur lets him—encourages him, a little smile across his mouth and a twitch of his fingers against Eames’s hand.

“So,” says Eames, pouring the scotch in his flat, “what’s the real game here?”

“There have to be one?” Arthur drawls. He’s sitting on Eames’s sofa, one ankle on his other knee, hands clasped behind his head. All long lines, his body language open and languid. His suit is deep grey, warmed by a blush shirt and a tie patterned in rusty orange and rich gold. The colors shouldn’t work; they do, because it’s Arthur.

“It’d be out of character if there weren’t one,” Eames replies, and holds out the scotch. Arthur leans forward and takes it; their fingers brush.

“Wanted to see you,” Arthur says, eyes on his; he hasn’t moved away yet, and their hands are still touching.

Smiling blandly, Eames moves backward, picks up his own glass. “For what, though?”

“You might know.” Arthur’s voice is low, his eyes warm.

“Might? You’ll need to do better than that.”

Arthur’s eyes widen at that, as if he’s startled, but they go hooded after a moment. “I could give you a better idea,” he says, lower.

Eames tips his head to the side, considering it—appearing to consider it—before he goes to the sofa himself and sits, his knee an inch from Arthur’s.

“Before you do, though,” says Eames, quiet enough that Arthur has to lean in, whether he wants to or not. And the part Arthur is playing means that he wants to. Eames sets his glass down on the coffee table, without bothering with a coaster.

“I wanted to—before anything else,” Eames breathes, barely a murmur, and Arthur’s face is scant centimeters from his. It’s a thrill, truly it is, and under any other circumstances— Eames closes the distance, brushes his lips against Arthur’s. Soft and warm and feather-light, and Arthur makes a tiny sound. He pulls back, meets his eyes—level, a little challenge in the crinkles at the outer corners—and returns—not so light now, or so soft, and there’s that tiny sound like a sigh or a hum, almost familiar, and Arthur opens beneath his lips, that easily.

Eames pulls away again, meets Arthur’s eyes, mutters, “Darling, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.” An unexpected chill shoots down his spine, a wrongness born of recognition—déjà vu, _strong_—and something flashes across Arthur’s face, there and gone. But he has work to do, so before he can let himself think further, he kisses Arthur again, open-mouthed and hungry. A shock (but not, _how is it not_), the heat of his mouth, how his tongue plays against Eames’s bottom lip—

It isn’t as hot, though, as the blood that spills over Eames’s hand as he draws the knife across Arthur’s throat.

Something flares in Arthur’s eyes before they go empty, and that’s a ruined outfit and a flat to burn.

Arthur does not _hook up_. He does not come to a place or a person like Eames for _sex_.

Eames might not know the exact game, but he knows the script, and being genre-savvy is half the battle. He changes clothes, keeps the knife until he can ditch it in the lagoon, loads up his pockets with currency for a few handy countries, sets the fire, and is gone.

The entire time, he scrapes away at that feeling—recollection, where there’s never been anything to collect—like an archaeologist on a dig.

Something’s up.

***

“_Shit_—_”_

“What—”

“Slit my fucking throat. Status? Up here?”

“Mark is settled; we’ve got an hour—Jesus, your _throat_?”

“How long.” Not a question.

“A minute and sev—”

“Five more.”

“Not yet. You’re a mess.”

Harsh, “Fuck off. Send me down.”

A sharp breath, and then: “_No_." 

"_Fuck off_—”

"Drink this. Fine, drink _half_ of it. There. Okay. _Thank _you.”

Grudgingly, barely audible, “Thanks.”

“Don’t—not yet. Five minutes, starting—”

***

The thing is, Eames is thinking, as he goes through all the motions of setting up a new life and getting a new ID and dropping the news with the right people at the right times—the thing is—and he worries at this, like it’s a loose tooth.

The thing is that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

Even when the bullshitter is, say, yourself, and you’re trying to do the bullshitting.

And Eames is a _very good_ bullshitter.

Which—abandoning the slang regarding livestock manure—is to say that the chill Eames felt, hearing himself say _we’ve got to stop meeting like this_, cannot be dismissed out of hand. The line itself was patter, of course, but the ice down his spine was genuine. Its trigger was that sense that he’d said it before, that he’d _kissed Arthur_ before. _Almost familiar_, he’d thought, hearing the sound Arthur made when he was kissing someone like he meant it.

And when he really wracks his brain over it, he thinks he remembers… other things. There’s the spill of blood over his hand, of course. There’s also a teacup, he thinks, or a coffee cup, china in a familiar pattern, and something in his onetime favorite casino, which he’d stopped frequenting ages ago, having decided—having _thought_ he decided—that it wasn’t any good for a crowd to get used to his face.

They all relate, _somehow_—if he chases it too hard, it evaporates—to Arthur.

Those blanknesses in his memory.

Déjà vu.

Shadows of images.

Images that link, however tenuously, to Arthur, best point in the business.

Eames hasn’t been wading in the shallows of dreamshare for as long as he has been not to recognize those.

Arthur, and therefore Cobb, the only extractor Arthur will work with anymore—Arthur and Cobb have been fucking about in his head.

He is somewhere beyond anger.

Not that he’s processed his feelings about this development in a healthy and considered manner, oh, no; that’s not what he means at all. The reality is far more… productive. The magnitude, the breadth, the intensity of his fury is so vast, so all-consuming, that he’s transcended it. His rage has become a foot-thick wall of glass, perfectly clear and scorching to the touch, between himself and the rest of the world.

Eames waits, behind that wall.

He doesn’t have a single moment of haziness, not this time, and he has the feeling that the clarity is related to the anger. Eames goes about his business, and plans, and waits.

When Arthur arrives off the train, Eames is waiting for him. He watches as the jowly man in the bad suit sets off at the heavy, sedate pace of the very rich. Behind him, there’s Arthur, wrinkled and grumpy from the ride, no case or anything with him, hands shoved in the pockets of his olive-green coat. Eames reels, momentarily, with the memory of Arthur’s mouth hot against his, and then he shakes it off.

In a moment, he has Arthur by the upper arm. “Lovely to see you,” he says. “Come along. Do look normal. You know how to do that, yes? How was the train?”

“Fine,” says Arthur. He’s obliging like that. “Where we going?”

“I’ll do the asking, I think,” Eames replies, and pulls open a door marked SERVICE ONLY in several languages. There’s a staircase behind, diamond-treaded steel, and at the foot of the stairs, a hall and a door marked UTILITY. Eames pushes it open and shoves Arthur inside. Before Arthur can speak, Eames has him zip-tied by the wrists to a steam pipe dripping a Spanish moss of ruptured fiberglass insulation. He kicks the door shut behind him and, for lack of better options, engages the button lock and shoves a wad of currency in the crack above the floor.

“The fuck are you _doing_?”

“I said I’ll do the asking.” Eames hears the coolness of his own tone, the detachment. He tends to linger on liquid consonants when he’s this bloody furious, draw out the vowels. “What’s Cobb after?” he says.

Arthur’s face is a picture, truly. Brow furrowed, mouth slack like he’s actually confused. ”Cobb?”

“That’s how you’re playing it, then,” says Eames, and draws his H&K. “You or Cobb, I don’t care. You’re extracting from me.” He aims. His hand is perfectly steady. “For _what_.”

The blank shock is almost convincing. “What? No one’s extracting—”

Eames shoots him in the knee.

Arthur yells, a short, sharp noise that he cuts off by biting his own tongue, it looks like, and when he speaks he’s gasping. “It’s true,” he says, meeting Eames’s eyes. “No extraction. Not us, no one else.” He breaks, pants. “I watch. I promised.” As if the words are being ripped out of him, he spits, “I keep my fucking promises.”

“Until you don’t,” says Eames, cold, and shoots him again. Same leg, further down. Mustn’t hit anything too important too soon. Arthur’s shinbone snaps in two and he nearly crumples before he gets his weight off it. “You let me down, didn’t you. Left me behind.”

That gets him a sharp inhale, but no words. Arthur stares at him, gaze level, even with the white visible all around his irises.

“So that was the dam broken, rather,” Eames continues. “Bloody _mind crime_, you lot fucking about in my head.” A dam broken—well, his wall of rage has sprung a leak, apparently. Arthur had looked at him just that steadily before they’d kissed, except they never _have_ kissed, not in reality— “I’ve got _ghosts _of you, you little shit,” he snarls. “Three of them. So—” _Oh_. “So you haven’t even _managed _it, you _fucking _leech, maybe I can just _tell_ you and—”

“No one is extracting from you!” It’s a strangled kind of shout, erupting through Arthur’s gritted teeth. “Eames, fuck’s sake, I’m fucking—I’m trying to—”

Another shot. The other knee. Arthur falls, his voice breaking into nothing; he’s supported on broken limbs and the zip tie behind his back, pressing his wrists into the insulation around the steam pipe. It must hurt. Fiberglass feels like sandpaper on fire, once it gets under the skin.

“Trying to what,” Eames asks, affecting boredom, but he’s curious. “I’ve killed you three times already. I’ll keep it from going real if you tell me.”

“To help,” gasps Arthur; his neck is all twisted, head at an odd angle, craning to look at Eames.

Eames aims carefully.

Arthur looks at the barrel and back at him, and it’s—it’s like the fight goes out of him, although nothing changes about his posture. Nothing _can_, not if he wants to look Eames in the face, and he does, apparently, his gaze anguished, but there’s something beyond that—

He speaks, ragged and low. “You’re in Limbo.”

“Oh, like hell.”

“You_ are_. I fucked up.” His head falls, then. “You’re here because of me.”

Eames sighs and shoots. He doesn’t correct for the shift in posture, gets Arthur in the jaw instead of the chest. But it still stops him fucking talking. He can’t spin fairytales with half his jawbone in shards on the floor and his tongue a useless lump of meat, although he shrieks with the pain, his esophagus undamaged.

It’s a sloppy, messy, unnecessarily painful kind of thing, but Eames has a point to make. He squats and waits until Arthur lifts his head—can’t say _lifts his chin_, not without one.

Waits until Arthur, tears streaming down what’s left of his face and blood darkening his coat, looks him in the eye. His gaze is steady, proud, agonized, _beseeching_.

“I’ll never believe you, darling,” says Eames, soft. “I don’t know why you want me to off myself, but it’s not going to happen.” And, fuck it, he says, “I’m terribly sorry.”

He raises the gun, aims it between Arthur’s eyes. Arthur looks at him, and looks at him, and then his face relaxes. He looks nearly peaceful as he lets his eyes fall closed, tears spiking his lashes into little clumps.

Eames adds, “I quite liked you, you know.”

And pulls the trigger.

He leaves a second wad of cash with the body and strips off his sport coat and shirt. They’d caught most of the blood, so he can ball them up and shove them in a bin somewhere. In his sleeveless undershirt and loose-cut drab trousers and boots, Eames looks like a worker, or enough like one that the spatters on his trousers could be anything, mud or paint or whatever. His gun is holstered again, the lines visible at his side, but everyone carries here. And anyway, he’s not far from one of his drops.

The thing that bothers him, he thinks, ditching the bundle of clothes, is that Arthur—careful, dispassionate Arthur—believed _himself_, with a degree of conviction Eames has only seen when Arthur was the only voice in dreamshare insisting on Cobb’s innocence. Arthur had never gotten around to erasing _all_ of his tells. Furthermore, Eames knows what Arthur’s face does—did, when he was asking for a quick death to wake him. In the facilities closet, on shattered legs with a gun in his ruined face, there hadn’t been a trace of that expression. _That _was a man who thought he was telling the truth. One who would have taken any additional millisecond on offer to plead his case.

He believed to his core that he’d never extracted from Eames, that he’d never been on a team with Eames as its mark.

He _believed_ he was helping.

He believed _this_ was Limbo, Eames thinks, emerging from the station. This dusty, fever-bright city with its early-morning crowds of hawkers and workers and everyone desperate for something. This bloody, oil-drenched, crime-ridden warren of gangsters and corporate spies and extortionists and people who’d sell anything, _anything_, to a willing buyer.

_This_. Looking at _this _and seeing Limbo.

It’s nearly funny, except Eames is wearing the blood of a man he’d liked and respected—not trusted, but _respected_—for it.

The strength of Arthur’s confidence suggests… all sorts of things. For Arthur to _believe_ reality was Limbo, that would have required… well, Occam’s razor suggests some kind of psychosis.

But the particular inflection of _you are in Limbo, and I put you here_—that speaks to something more complex, although without dreamshare it’d be hard to describe an occasion more complex than a psychotic break.

A series of extractions, perhaps, that shifted Arthur’s own ability to track reality, that incorporated the particular suggestibility of the dream state. That’s actually more likely, Eames thinks, extractions further back, because the man never left dreamshare once it got its hooks into him, so how else would his enemies have gotten to him? Particularly the caliber of enemy it had taken for one to _successfully _get to Arthur. One who Eames might share, even, although he’s uncertain anyone in the business knows Arthur well enough to—but then, that’s what extraction is _for_, to discover and exploit weaknesses. Arthur’s enemy may very well have been after a twofer. Such an enemy must have been bitter enough to think that one death was too simple. Arthur’s foe had wanted to see him unravel.

Instead of death, an _induced _psychosis, highly specific, to convince Arthur that Eames had to die. Arthur’s own particular moral code would have done the rest; he never killed without the victim knowing exactly why.

It’d have been as simple as messing with his totem, Eames realizes. At first. The other stuff, _take Eames with you_—that would have been a virtuosic operation indeed. He almost wishes he had seen it.

Arthur’s flawless security would only have had to fail once. Someone could have gotten ahold of his die and ensured that, in his next Somnacin dream—in _every _subsequent dream; that tip alone would make a mint—it’d come up on the same number every time.

And suddenly—reality had become unanchored, shifting beneath Arthur’s polished shoes, quagmire where he’d relied on bedrock. Arthur, being Arthur, being a stick-in-the-mud so meticulous and paranoid that the failure of his own warning systems had never crossed his mind, had instead jumped from quagmire to quicksand: that reality wasn’t, and that those with him were stuck.

It must have been so _simple_, that first step.

He’s nearly at one of his stashes, where he can grab a clean set of clothes and go about his day. Granted, his day will probably consist entirely of drinking strong cocktails at some bar where no one knows him. He doesn’t _like_ having killed Arthur.

He almost can’t believe he’s had to kill Arthur, but his blood is, quite literally, on Eames’s hands.

Eames cannot _fathom_ the depth of sadism it had taken for someone, some shadowy figure, to do that to Arthur, and by extension to himself. His stomach churns merely thinking of it, as he ducks into a hole-in-the-wall café whose proprietor owes him several favors. His clothes are in the drop ceiling in the washroom; he changes quickly, then splashes water on his face.

He would never have _thought_ to—to try to get to Arthur that way.

Until someone else already had.

If someone had done it to Eames—

He wonders. He finds a bar, not too far, and orders scotch and soda. He wonders if, having lost his map pin in reality, he’d have tried to save Arthur—having determined, very clearly, that Arthur was not a projection, that the real Arthur’s consciousness was somehow down there _with _him—from Eames’s own imagined Limbo.

He thinks he might have. Might have wanted to free a sometimes-colleague, somewhat-friend who’s stuck in your mental prison—he _does_ like Arthur. Had liked Arthur. A great deal. (The ghost of a kiss—no; not now.) There’s no point in telling lies to a man you’re about to kill. Even less of a point in keeping secrets.

He wonders if, in a hypothetical reversal, Arthur would have been able to shake Eames off. Eames, trying to convince Arthur that reality _wasn’t_. If Arthur would have dissuaded him, somehow.

And when that failed—because it _would _have failed—if Arthur would have been able to do right by Eames. Either put him right or put him out of his bloody misery.

He hopes so.

Lord, he fucking hopes so.

***

A retch, spitting.

“_Jesus_— Shh, shh, shh, I got you. You’re up. We’re okay. Here. I’ll—one second. Here, it’s—there, there you go.”

“Don’t _mother_ me.” Strangled.

“What happened?”

“Caught on. Or—remembered. Pieces. Thought—thought I’d been extracting from him.”

“Okay—what _happened_, though—”

“Torture. Y’know. Between friends.”

“…With?”

“Gun. Shot here, here, here, and _here_, before he—I don’t know. Took _pity_.”

A pause. Then, “Send me down.”

“What—_no_. _No,_ fucking—_stop it, _put that _down_—”

“This is killing you!”

“Not for real—damn it, _drop it, _fucking _stop— _Jesus _CHRIST_—”

A clatter. “Okay.” Softly. “Okay. Could you explain why not? I won’t touch anything.”

“He doesn’t know you, doesn’t _remember_ you; it’s not going to—he’ll just kill you. And _I_ fucked it up, _I_ put him there, _I’m_ getting him out. And—_shit_, I just—” Silence, a shaky inhale.

“What else?”

“Jesus fucking— _you’ve_ been in Limbo before. I am _not _putting you back. I’m _not_. I—don’t make me. I—I can’t.”

Silence. And, quietly, “I get it.”

“Not that I—that I don’t appreciate it, I mean— But it’s progress, right, that he remembers, however that works. It’s—I’m starting to stick. I just have to—fuck, I don’t know.”

“_Not _his totem.”

“No. Of course not. But if… —_but. _Shit. He can forge—oh, that’s an idea.”

“That… is an idea. Are you—you’re sure?”

“Ask me that again. Dare you.” Half-laughing.

“Okay, okay, okay, don’t _look_ at me like that, jeez. That was fifteen seconds, by the way. We’ve been—you’ve been up for five minutes. And here’s—here’s another five.”

A pause. Exhausted, sincere, “Thank you.”

“Shut up. Good luck—”

***

The smuggling ring is going quite nicely, really. It’s _ethical_, in principle if not (at all) in practice, moving money and minerals away from the mining corporations, routing the rocks to groups that’ll ensure provenance every step of the way all the way into some westerner’s hands. Those groups have people, of course, who give Eames’s ring a decent cut of the profit, and then all but their operating costs goes to laborers. Directly or indirectly, or to their families, directly or indirectly—get the children forced into the mines back home, and getting their homes to be places where they can be reliably fed, educated, allowed to be _children_. It’s _not_ a small thing, dismantling the corporations’ workforces, not when those child workers need everything that the lack of had driven them to the mines to begin with.

But they’re getting somewhere, and it’s beginning to show. Increases in raw material costs, mainly, which don’t show up unless one looks for them, and Eames has been tracking the worth of coinage metals and precious metals and unprocessed minerals for _years_, it feels like. It’s like a hit, nearly as good, seeing a tick that all the analysts in the world can’t trace to anything they’re tracking. At least, he remembers the opiates being that good. He gave all that up when he got in with the ring; it’s the kind of thing that demands all of him, every last atom.

He still drinks, of course, because he’s bloody human.

And because it’s the best way to make the memory of Arthur disappear.

Not drinking alone—he learned that but quickly. When he finds himself looking for dark hair and dark suits, a green overcoat, a figure who strides like the world is his to manage, Eames finds a friend. Someone from the ring, or one of their associates, and they get roaring drunk and watch the cricket or football or something else where they can yell, and then he sleeps like the dead and wakes like the undead and goes back to work. It’s a surprising amount of effort, getting dirty money clean and _keeping_ it that way. Helping.

He feels, sometimes, that it’s the least he can do. He’s turned his back on dreamshare, the facilitation of corporate maneuvering for the sake of yet more capital, only to hoard it as the world starves and burns and works its children to hollow-eyed husks breathing leachate fumes. Dreamshare killed Arthur—no, he can’t let himself get away with that. _He_ killed Arthur.

However, dreamshare had broken Arthur, beyond repair.

Eames won’t let it break him.

Years pass. Approximately. The hazes begin hitting again, once he’s clean—only _after_ he’s clean, after he’s deep in with the smuggling ring. There are operations that go awry, where he has to disappear, and sometimes then… But he remembers more than he used to, after the blurriness clears. He remembers the ring, and the reason he’s in it. He remembers a kiss and a slit throat. Poison in a coffee cup. A knife to the belly.

_Three times already_. And making it real. Blood soaking a shirtfront and tie whose original colors he had never registered.

He catches Freddie before she leaves town, when he finds himself thinking that way this time. They drink gimlets through a Premier League match that neither of them cares about; Eames can’t even remember who’s playing by the end, not for love or money. “And you’d do _ever_ so much for love, of course,” Freddie says. She’s a wonderful woman, the kind whose downright decency is so close to the bone she survived British public schooling _and_ the shark tank of high society without losing her love for dogs and horses and children and _justice_.

She could probably break Eames in half. He adores her.

“Or for money,” Eames replies, which isn’t terribly witty, but Freddie laughs like it is.

“You’re steadier, then?” she asks, light enough that he might not think she were worried if he didn’t know her so well. “You’ll be all right?”

He will be. He _has_ to be. He pulls a face instead of answering, because that way he’s not lying. “I’ll be some way.”

Freddie’s already laid out cash for the drinks, and now she stands, puts on her coat, kisses his cheek. “You’ll be all right,” she says, a statement this time. “And if you’re not, I’ll know why and I’ll kick his arse.”

“How would you know whether there’s a he?”

Her look is unimpressed. “My sweet, you’ve lit up every time a brunet’s gone by. It’s nothing recent, I know; you’re not keeping yourself quite so polished, and you haven’t been. But loves don’t ever go quietly, do they? Popping up so inconveniently. Like they own the place. Impolite, really.”

Eames blinks. _Love_. “It is, rather,” he says, instead of arguing, because it’s easier than attempting to explain he’s thinking of a man he’d killed years ago. “Downright vulgar.”

Freddie smiles and wraps him up in a hug and leaves in a cloud of perfume. It’s getting towards evening, the bar starting to fill with the dinner crowd. One screen leaves the Premier League post-game up, but the others start flickering to different games, different sports, the news. Eames watches the crawler stories, focusing more on the stream of black-on-yellow rather than the individual words. He’s drunker than he should be, he decides, and makes his way out.

He does love the city. It smells all the time, and the dust is incredible, but the light can be beautiful—slanted and golden, right now—and the crush of humanity is exhilarating. Just ahead of him, between two hijabi, a blond woman in a spectacular cocktail dress walks along the street like it’s a runway. A man with silvered hair paces her, the heavy, measured sort of stride of a gentleman who could own the earth. He’d have to go much farther afield to get this kind of contact high, this variety, this many opportunities for cover. Although he hasn’t needed to hide in a crowd in—

“Mr. Eames,” says a voice, and Eames’s body reacts before he identifies it. In his next breath, he’s halfway down a narrow alley between two three-story buildings, a space barely wide enough for two men, which is fine, because he’s only got the one man, arm twisted behind his back, face pressed against the bricks. His eyes take a moment to adjust from the golden brightness, and when they do, he sees the wrinkles in the olive-green canvas of the man’s overcoat where it’s gone too tight around his shoulders. Above that, dark hair, slicked down, a sharp jawline and high cheekbone—

Eames drops his wrist and falls backward; the plaster of the opposite wall of the alley catches him far too soon, keeps him far too close to—to _this_. His head is swimming with gin and shock, his vision speckling out and his own pulse thundering in his ears. The H&K feels too heavy, slick against his fingers.

“I _shot you_.” His voice sounds thin, his breath far too fast. “I shot you five _times_—”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, straightening his coat and brushing brick dust off the front as he turns. His tone is nearly emotionless, but his laugh lines are apparent, even in shadow. “I was there. Hey—” He grabs Eames’s shoulder, holding him more or less upright. “Stay with me.” His inflection is odd for the urgency of the words. He drawls them, like they’re a reminder he doesn’t expect Eames to receive with any grace. With his other hand he neatly relieves Eames of the gun. “Didn’t come back for you to faint on me,” he mutters. “Or shoot me again.”

“I _shot_ you,” Eames echoes, dizzy.

Arthur replies patiently, “I _know_. You good, or you need a minute?”

He manages to say, “Before what?”

Arthur’s mouth flattens, but his eyes still hold amusement, and he’s _looking at Eames _with them, impossibly whole and _alive_, and Eames is certain no one slipped anything into his drinks, so _why_— “We gotta talk,” Arthur answers. “Not in an alley. I don’t know where your place is, so—”

“It’s—” Eames’s vision is clear now, although he’s still not certain if this isn’t a very detailed hallucination. “You’ve been there,” he says. “You’ve been to my place. If this is—if—”

“You’ve lived in twenty-plus different flats,” Arthur interrupts. “That I’ve found record of. So probably more like fifty total. I’ve been inside one, and that was—” He glances skyward. “Something like… ten years ago?”

Eames blinks. Arthur doesn’t look ten years older than—than anything. He looks as old as Eames expects him to. “Fifty,” he repeats softly, because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Really?”

“As an estimate. You good?”

He tests his own footing. “To get to my flat,” he says, more for confirmation. “With you. And you’re not—dead.”

“I am not dead,” Arthur says firmly. His mouth twitches. “Lead on, Mr. Eames.”

Arthur is the only person Eames knows who _adds_ an honorific when he’s feeling indulgent.

And he has Eames’s gun, now in one of his coat pockets. Eames raises his eyebrows and sighs and says, “All right, then,” and sets off for home.

He likes this flat. He knows he’s rattled around the city a great deal—_ten years? _He never says anywhere that long, but he supposes the smuggling ring has rather fixed him—but this is a good flat, three floors above a bakery, so it’s got all the good smells and less of the morning crowd noise. Airy in the summer, and free heat in what passes for winter.

Arthur looks around attentively. “It’s nice,” he says, after a moment, and hangs up his coat. Which—no, no chance; he goes for the pocket and moves Eames’s gun to a back holster. It’s unfair, the number of arms Arthur can fit about his person without messing up his suits. Today’s is khaki, nearly boring, but with a faint large-scale windowpane check on the waistcoat. His shirt is a narrow ivory tone-on-tone stripe; his tie is pale blue.

“Drink?” Eames says, at a loss. He—he remembers Arthur’s blood on his hands, three times, not to mention dosing his coffee with poison. And yet Arthur is here, and ten years (ten _years?_) have passed.

“I’m good,” Arthur replies easily, and has a seat on the sofa facing the window.

Eames downs a full glass of water standing up at the sink before he goes over to the wingback chair next to the sofa. He sits and says, for lack of anything else, “Ten years, you said.”

“Approximately.” Arthur is looking out the window, at the beginning of the glorious but short near-equatorial sunset. “Where are we?”

“Excuse me?” Eames narrows his eyes; it doesn’t make Arthur’s question make any more sense.

Arthur waves at the window. “The city.”

“You _came_ here.”

“I _arrived_ here,” Arthur corrects. “Crucial difference.” He looks at Eames. “So. Where are we? How’d you come here?”

Eames is flummoxed. “We’re in—”

And freezes, as the past flips through his mind like a day-to-day calendar. He’d come to Africa at nineteen, but that was with the military, when he was posted in Nairobi, and—and then what?

He is abruptly, terribly sober.

He’s never left the city, he knows that. Only moved among its different neighborhoods, through its seemingly endless sprawl.

Has he ever received a conventional piece of mail with a postal address? He must have, he must have—he just can’t remember— In _ten years_. More than, because Arthur thinks Eames killed him ten years ago.

But Eames remembers the harmattan, an Atlantic phenomenon of Ho and Abuja. The bridges linking neighborhoods across creeks and lagoons—Mombasa and Lagos. The markets like Marrakesh’s, and the hot bright dryness of Cairo— He stares at Arthur, mute.

Arthur turns his gaze from the window, towards Eames. “Yeah,” he says, in response to whatever he sees. Just that.

“A dream,” says Eames, half a question. “A—”

He hasn’t used a physical totem since Mal. Sure, he carries the poker chip, because it’s a nice deflector, but there’s nothing about it to make it totemic. It’s merely a symbol.

“If it’s a dream,” Arthur says, calm and light, like he’s floating an idea of no particular importance, “you can forge, right?”

Eames blinks. “I—” He’s rather sick of not completing his own sentences. There’s a mirror next to the coatrack. Placing his glass of water on the end table, he goes to the mirror and examines his own reflection. He looks as he should, sandy hair parted on the left, grey-blue eyes, mouth pursed in worry. His own nose, his chin, his tan.

In forging—lord, it’s been an age—he always remembered himself first, he thinks. Then overlaid the mannerisms and look of the forge, sketched the changes necessary to fit himself into the new shape. Now, he meets his own gaze and reverse-engineers himself at age nineteen. His features had been largely the same, of course, but he’d been paler, his chin more prominent, his hair appearing darker. He had stood straighter, without the problems with his own hip. Eames sketches the outlines of himself with his fingers, the entire process rather like doing stage makeup but without brushes.

He lets his eyes fall closed; that’s part of it.

When he opens them, nothing has changed.

“Fuck,” he says, and rounds on the sofa as Arthur turns. “If we’re dreaming, I _should_ be able to forge,” he snarls, “but I can’t, can I—”

Arthur holds up both hands, eyes wide. His die is tucked between the first two fingers of his left hand. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’d—I’d wondered about that. Since we’re—okay. Look.” He throws the die on the coffee table. It comes up five. “Shit.”

“Oh,” Eames says, dry; he’s got a Beretta in the cabinet above the sink. “Listen to you. Getting sloppy, hm?”

Arthur shakes his head, picks up the die. As Eames gets the Beretta, he hears the rattle of Arthur throwing it again. He turns, pistol at the ready—

The die reads three, and his heart jumps sideways. Arthur’s hands are back in the air, palms out. He looks at Eames, at the gun, and inhales sharply. “Cast it yourself,” he says.

Eames lifts his chin and keeps the gun in one hand. “You’re not supposed to let me do that.” His voice is cold.

“You caught me already,” Arthur says, reasonable. “I shouldn’t have reacted. So it’s compromised. Cast it.”

Eames keeps his eyes on Arthur’s—dark, serious as a heart attack—as he leans and picks up the die. He holds it up to the light from the window. The red resin is translucent, and there’s a darkening, faint, near the face with two pips, just as he expected. “What is this supposed to prove?” he asks, distant, despite the fluttering of his own pulse.

“Just throw it,” Arthur replies. His jaw is tightening, like he’s nervous.

Eames throws it.

Four.

“Bloody hell,” he murmurs, staring at it, and picks it up. Casts it again. Six. He looks at Arthur.

“I saw some of your previous forges,” Arthur says, apropos of nothing. “I have every time.”

“My previous—wait. Projections of _mine_?”

Arthur blinks at his tone and replies, carefully, firmly, “You have never been the subject of an extraction attempt.” He’s still gazing directly at Eames, nearly burning with conviction.

Eames—chooses to humor that, for now. “How are projections of mine wandering around, then? And who? We’ve seen the same people.”

This—this seems to be the sticking point, for Arthur. He swallows, twice, and then says, “Can I have—” and gestures toward the water glass. Eames waves his hand; Arthur gulps half the glass, and then says in a rush, “Consider that you might be in Limbo.”

“Like hell,” he says, automatically, but— the composite quality of the city, the _namelessness _of the city, Arthur’s four deaths and here he is, sitting on Eames’s sofa. “No,” he says, a hopeless denial. “_This_ is my bloody subconscious?” He tries to make a joke of it at the last second, twisting his voice upward, throwing a dramatic gesture at the window, but it rings hollow.

“What do you remember about Dom?” Arthur asks.

No matter what kind of non-sequitur, that’s easy to answer. “He’s a prick.”

Arthur nods easily, which—_that_ doesn’t square. “What about his current status with the feds? In the States.”

“He’s—” Eames blinks; something beckons, the sound of a passport being stamped. “His name’s cleared,” he says, but how does he know that?

Arthur nods again. “Do you remember how he got cleared?”

He snaps, “Get to the bloody point.”

“Okay. Our—my theory is that your subconscious, the stuff you pull on for dreaming, doesn’t—include episodic memory from the recent past.” Eames doesn’t believe Arthur has blinked in about ninety seconds; he’s watching Eames that intently. “You have the, the semantic, the bare facts, but without the episodic context and no reason to think about what doesn’t fit, it hasn’t been relevant. We—I’ve done some reading.” He pauses, and then says, deliberately, “Topside.”

Eames says, just as deliberately, “We.”

Arthur’s shoulders slump and he presses his hands to his face, before smoothing them over his hair and clasping his fingers at the back of his own neck, elbows on his knees. The motion, the posture is immediately familiar, in a way that shakes Eames—he feels he’s _seen_ Arthur like this, although he can’t _remember_ ever being in a situation where Arthur let his body language betray him so badly. Even when they’d kissed, he’d been all control… and that, too, had been familiar.

“If you don’t remember how Dom got home—you’re not going to know. But—look, okay, this might take me a little, you know I suck at forging—”

“You _can’t_ forge,” Eames says immediately, because that’s a fact of life: Liverpool fans are insufferable, bright colors are more comfortable than pastels, and Arthur cannot forge.

“You can’t remember me learning,” says Arthur, looking up at him again, and Eames has to catch his breath. Arthur looks worse than he had with half his face shot off, that agonized and beyond, and _grieving_— “Or you don’t. But—give me a little. It’s—I don’t know what it looks like.”

He holds his posture, folded over with his hands behind his neck, and drops his head. Eames watches, sharp, until Arthur raises his head—

A delicate nose turned up at the tip, a broad forehead that Dickens would have gone into transports over, large round eyes two shades lighter than Arthur’s own, a stubborn chin.

Consider Eames’s facts of life revised.

The name drops into his mind like a leaf onto the surface of a pond, the ripples slight now, but— “Ariadne,” says Eames. “‘There will _be_ enough time,’” he adds slowly, echoing her, her flat accent and the emphases born of desperation, “‘and we _will_ _find_ him.’”

“Which is what I said,” Arthur’s voice says, and the forge falls back into his own face, but his eyes stay just as wide. “And she agreed. You—”

“You fucked up,” Eames interrupts. “You—the mark shot me. Three levels down, and you were supposed to be—”

“I nearly killed her,” Arthur says. “The mark. But I got—you remember the chain, two of us on each level, up to Ariadne on the first, and she _wasn’t_ sedated so she woke right up, and the chemist doled out the block that negated the sedative for the rest of us, so I knocked out the mark and rode the kick up, but you—you were in Limbo. And you _got_ the agonist, but it’s—the way Limbo goes. Keeps you until you wake, if you do. We got the mark squared away, or—Ariadne did. I was—I was fucking useless. I swear she nearly punched me. Five different times. In twenty minutes.”

Eames stands there and listens, and thinks, and then sits, carefully, on the sofa next to Arthur. He puts the Beretta on the coffee table, next to the die. “Twenty minutes,” he repeats, staring down at the gun, the polished wood, the red resin die. “That’s topside. Which was…four months? With this sedative? On the third level. And God knows how long down here.” He looks at Arthur. “And then you come to my rescue, and I rip your guts out.” Eames swallows.

“And poison my coffee,” says Arthur. “And the throat slash. And the—” He swallows. “The gunshots.”

“And you _keep coming back_.”

Arthur laughs, a short bark of a sound. “Like I’d leave you in your dump of a subconscious. And—Ariadne and I thought—I mean, you’re naturally… reticent.”

“Paranoid. You can say it, darling.” The endearment—Eames cringes. He’s used it each time he’s killed Arthur. Down here, anyway, down here in Limbo.

He’s in Limbo. He’s _been _in Limbo. The smuggling ring isn’t real. None of it’s real. Freddie—_Freddie. Freddie Simmonds. By God, it’s you, isn’t— _Riley, the blonde, in that fantastic dress he’d seen once in a Tokyo club. Peter Browning, who he’d been on the Fischer job—

“Why,” he asks, “are we sitting here, when we could be getting back upstairs?”

Arthur smiles, but it’s a tiny, sad thing. “I needed to be sure,” he says. “That you’re sure. That—that you know. Because the way it happened with Mal—”

“She couldn’t trace the origin of it,” says Eames, recollections surfacing as his mind comes to a boil, memories rising like bubbles. Ariadne had recounted all of it, after the Fischer job, spilled all of Cobb’s desperate mistakes. “Because Cobb’s a prick. But _you_—I know you’re—”

“Also a prick. But thorough.”

“I know,” says Eames, and picks up the gun. “I know, and I—I want to _wake up_, I want to—” He remembers kissing Arthur the night before the job, Arthur kissing _him_, sly smooth Arthur dropping all his smoothness and simply lunging for Eames, pressing him to a wall and pressing their mouths together, hot and rough and perfect, _perfect_, and Eames thinking and then _saying_, “Damn it all, we need a full night’s sleep,” after _years_. It’s been fucking years, topside and here both, and he’s kept himself well separate because he doesn’t need a partnership of that sort messing up his life, but, _Jesus_, he wants it, he wants Arthur. And that crystallized the first moment he heard that subvocal sigh, with Arthur’s body against his and Arthur’s hands on either side of his face— “Darling,” Eames says, dragging himself to the present, or as present as he can be, “I’ve—would you do the honors? I’ve rather—had enough of killing you.” He holds out the Beretta, grip-first.

Arthur smiles, open and warm, but doesn’t take the gun. Instead, he retrieves Eames’s own H&K from his back holster. “We’ll go together,” he says, and places the barrel of the H&K against Eames’s temple. The metal is smooth, not at all cold, and this, too, is a memory, one with a hundred echoes, but Arthur has never looked this fond.

Eames reaches for his hand, because—because there’s no point in keeping secrets from a man who’s about to kill you. Arthur grabs it, laces their fingers together, leans in and presses a kiss to the corner of Eames’s mouth.

He wants to chase it, kiss back, but—reality awaits. He lifts the Beretta, holds it to Arthur’s head. “On three?”

Arthur nods. “You count.”

Eames watches him, and feels his heart sing, and counts out, “One, two, _three_—”

**Author's Note:**

> This officially completes my Inceptiversary 2019 Trope Bingo card. Thank you, trope/kink bingo organizers, for a wonderful opportunity to play.
> 
> Of course I made fluff out of the vampire fic and used the fluffy prompt for ten thousand words of murder, for which I would apologize if I were sorry. I want to thank a tumblr poster whose username I forget, which is typical of me, for their discussion of canon!Eames, emphasizing his pragmaticisim and detachment from the rest of the team; that inspired the characterization here.
> 
> **[Added 8/26/19]** I nerd-sniped myself with notes and elaborations on how and why Eames experiences Limbo as he does, so a non-essential linked piece is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20924858). **However,** death of the author is in full effect: if you think the story ends here, it does.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading; I live for comments.


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